Is there significance to the all-female main characters in Annihilation?

Question

Having watched Annihilation (2018), the film adaptation by Alex Garland, I found it curious to see an all-female lead cast (barring Oscar Isaac who plays Kane). After discovering it was based on a book, I decided to inquire over the characters, rather than casting decisions.

• The story deals with DNA and involves an outpost named Area X (i.e. X chromosome)
• The (pink) book cover prominently features X (though this may only be a reference to Area X and nothing else)
  
• Has an all-female team of main characters (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor), which, in the movie, involves them using military weaponry in a jungle (typically male iconography)

• In the film there is a line that also addresses this question:

  — Dr. Ventress?
  — Mmm. Team leader.
  — All women.
  — Scientists.
  —The previous teams have been largely military, so, yeah.

My question is after whether the novel addresses this, or otherwise an analysis of the themes of the story have anything to do with women, and whether the all-female team factors into that somehow.

Answer 1

You mention many thematical reasons for this that are open to interpretation. I think they're interesting, and I hadn't considered them myself. The all-female expedition might also in some symbolic way refer to the creation of new life, etc. However, I'm not aware of any Word of God from Jeff VanderMeer or Alex Garland on this, so it's hard to touch upon it in an answer.

VanderMeer did give some information on the reason for one of the choices the Southern Reach makes when putting together the expeditions, which might be somewhat related (from this interview):

What made you decide to keep your main characters unnamed?
That’s a complicated question because it ultimately came down to a lot of interrelated decisions. On the practical side, the expeditions that have used names rather than job function have come to grief, as if it’s an easier way for whatever is in Area X to “hack” human beings.

So Area X influences humans, and somehow, the behavior and thought patterns of the humans make it easier or harder for Area X to do so. This is important for the rest of my answer.

The reason for the all-female expedition is addressed very early on in the first novel, in the first chapter:

There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions.

The expedition portrayed in the first novel and the movie is the twelfth expedition. The preceding expedition, which the biologist's husband (Kane in the movie) was a part of, consisted only of men:

The eleventh expedition had consisted of eight members, all male: a psychologist, two medics (including my husband), a linguist, a surveyor, a biologist, an anthropologist, and an archaeologist.

The actual reason is not explained, however, beyond the fact that the Southern Reach puts together teams for the expeditions based on many variables, including the members' professions and gender. This is expanded upon a little in Annihilation's sequel, the novel Authority (mild spoilers about the nature of the expeditions):

Each expedition number thereafter adhered to an [sic] particular set of metrics and introduced variables into the equation with each letter. For example, the eleventh expedition series had been composed of all men, while the twelfth, if it continued to X.12.B and beyond, would continue to be composed of all women. He wondered if his mother knew of any parallel in special ops, if secret studies showed something about gender that escaped him in considering the irrelevance of this particular metrid. And what about someone who didn't identify as male or female?

We don't really learn more about this "experiment" with the make-up of the expedition teams, except that it's mainly part of the approach of one specific person high up at the Southern Reach.

From the books, we know that the members are hand-picked based on their background and professions. You might also ask: Why is an anthropologist needed on an expedition like this? Why a linguist? And a psychologist? There are some reasons; a linguist could be needed to analyze a certain topographical anomaly that's not in the film, and the psychologist is needed in the book because the expedition needs to be hypnotized in order to cross the border/"Shimmer" there (and they're also perhaps conditioned in other ways to behave certain ways).

So, the in-universe reason is probably that the Southern Reach experiments with the members of the expeditions, both in practical ways (hypnosis) and in other ways to see if the expedition behaves differently as a result. Like VanderMeer implied in the interview above, and as you probably gathered from the film, all of the previous expeditions have "come to grief". Like in the film, we don't always know if the "premature dissolution of expedition" (as the book calls it) is caused by Area X itself or the expedition members and their dynamic. Did the men in the eleventh expedition go mad (as some thought when watching the footage they shot), or was their behavior influenced by Area X? Different group dynamics might help to understand that, and they might make it harder for Area X to "hack" them.

So that's my take on it. Southern Reach doesn't understand Area X, but they want to make it harder for Area X to influence the expeditions, so they're trying different things. Depersonalization of the members seemed to work, so why not try other weird things? The expeditions are also experiments, and it's important for the Southern Reach to control the experiments as much as possible, to separate the data from the noise.

The need for known variables in the expeditions is also mentioned this in-universe annotation to Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, in the context of understanding the sources of the data the expeditions bring back:

“Complicating the issue of recovering reliable data from disastrous Area X expeditions is the question of influence. Are we looking at interference from Central or from Area X? Are we looking at something imposed by the landscape onto expedition members or something they brought with them?” – Note purportedly from the notebook of an unidentified Southern Reach scientist and leaked to conspiracy sites; subsequently discredited as a fake.

Answer 2

Out of universe, Garland was led by the desire to make a film that directly contrasted from his last film's themes of sexuality, gender and (literal and figurative) objectification. Evidently this is something he found to be most uncomfortable and making a film where the primary cast are almost entirely female was his attempt to make a film that lacked this sense of "argument".

Q. Making a movie with all female protagonists almost feels like a political statement today. Was that something that specifically drew you to this?

Garland: I really just want to dodge that question.

Q. Really?

Garland: Yeah. The answer that I’m saying – which I’ve said before, so I apologize for it, but I’m in a position where this is the answer that I have – is that the previous film that Oscar and I worked on together [Ex Machina] had within it a very conscious set of deliberate arguments which related to gender and objectification. As well as other stuff about sentience and AI and all of that kind of thing. And what interested me about this project was the absence of an argument. So if I now talk about that, I dismantle the absence of the argument. So I’d just like to leave it at that.

_{^{Alex Garland and Oscar Isaac on ‘Annihilation,’ the Film’s Behind-the-Scenes Clashes, and More}}

and

Alex Garland (AG): It’s based on a novel, and yes, I find the whole virtue signaling thing complex, and I’d rather just avoid it, but also it’s not something I can take any credit for because I was adapting a novel. I think in essence I had just done a film, “Ex Machina,” that, as part of its set of concerns, is concerned with gender, and there was a conversation within it about gender. In this what I was interested in doing was almost the absence of a discussion, that that was in itself a statement of sorts. There’s one real reference to it, and then it’s pointed out that they’re scientists.

_{^{‘Annihilation’ writer-director Alex Garland talks genre, eerie films and working with others}}

Answer 3

Just saw this movie before work & have never heard about the movie or the book. But I was listening to a youtuber give some explanations. I'm not the smartest person & apologies if someone already gave this answer. I was thinking since the male alien Kane already made it out of the shimmer & would need a female to be able to reproduce that the shimmer somehow made the humans make the decision to send in all females so hopefully a female alien would make it out so they could reproduce outside of the shimmer. That was the first thing that I thought of. They can produce offspring and start to take over the world maybe, IDK.